Thomas Ligotti (Detroit, 1953) we know very little. His biggest influence is H. P. Lovecraft. That as a good man pays homage to Poe, Machen, Robert Aickman, Nabokov, Bruno Schulz, Bernhard, Beckett or Cioran. Maybe he has spent his life in and out of mental institutions, asylums places we used to call, and we know and we understand that lived 70 going to rock concerts, drinking beer, smoking pot and eating acid until it collapsed into a panic attack that led him to write the stories collected in books like Noctuario or factory nightmares, symbolist fictions ancestry, applicants revelation, hallucinated mouth and close to abstraction in their statements.
Some have come to speculate that Ligotti, one of the most evocative authors of contemporary horror literature, could not be more than the invention of another macabre writer, any of those like him, know that there is no logic support that stupid thought in which matches most men: that human life is a good thing.
The inner experience

The conspiracy against the human species (Valdemar), which the author defines as "an artifact of horror" is the first theoretical book Ligotti, an essay toward abjection that opens quoting the German philosopher Julius Bahnsen in his definition makes two centuries: unlike nature, oblivious to their condition winner killings, "Nothing man is a self-conscious."
Ligotti, who hates every philosophical system that looks the raw facts of our lives to barruntar in circles (while the unthinkable resides outside of them), refers to the elemental provocative figure of Peter Wessel Zapffe Norwegian pessimistic locating our loss innocence at the time we acquired an overwhelming surplus of consciousness. It is in that moment, when the "accidental outgrowth" is given, that human life is exceeded paradox ago and we became absurd in the landscape.
Be the consciousness whatever, as cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind and neuroscientists still disagree about it, could speak of an alien flow dedicated to lie to tolerate it and manages to make us believe that we can escape our being "viciously useless". Convinces us that there is something to do, somewhere to go, something to be and someone to know. Consciousness, "mother of all horrors," makes us believe that being alive is not a mistake, that something makes sense.

Party Dummies

Ligotti speaks of a "prophylactic deception" that prevents us from seeing what you do not want to see, and so, to avoid the unbearable burden of consciousness we anchor in homelands, gods, families and a number of apocryphal natural rights, when "all birthright to wield right and left are lies invented for a purpose. "

All this is not new, but remains: "Most people learn to save artificially limiting the content of his consciousness" distract our minds with futile or transcendental rubbish, which just keep staring at the TV or this screen, stay tuned to the foreign policy of our government, scientific projects, our careers or unyielding our place in society and the cosmos amongst a number of inventions. If that is not enough we can always choose the most unique option to sublimate our fears and torments, for example, writing a book against the human species in which openly expose the most demoralizing and puzzling aspects of life.

Along the way, Ligotti last visit to "virtuosos of the devaluation of life" as Schopenhauer or Lovecraft, that marginality is assured when they refused to affirm the value and wonder of humanity and the validity of their values; questioned promoters of human survival as Nietzsche, mental conjurer and "adept yes" with his materialistic mysticism dazzled the amoralistas atheists, and pays special attention to the lucid fables fantastic cinema and literature have poured on the agony of being, among which are portraits of "ordinary people" Gone Snatchers those avatars where people lost all their human qualities except, curiously, one "of the content." Being happy.

Quoting the German Thomas Metzinger, Ligotti notes that "a human being is not a" person "but a" phenomenal self-model "of mechanical operation that simulates a person. The reason why we can not detect these models is that we see through them, so we can not see the processes of the models themselves. If we could, we would know that we are only these own models. This might be called "the paradox of Metzinger" can not know what you really are because then you would know that there is nothing to know and nothing to tell. "

The Great Illusion

Craving something in this world-a good physical or mental health, long life, happiness or even eliminating longingly is the source of all suffering.

The success of the jargon of positive psychology, that insane babble million selling self-help books every season since far too long, comes to certify widespread discontent and frustration of all men, which postulates that validate hold their thoughts and emotions and make them forget that life has no meaning, that happiness is not reached and that even exists only as a passenger, whimsical and silly exaltation.

The pessimist, "composed of the same scum that all mortals, clings to anything that seems to validate their thoughts and emotions" while the optimist, surrendered to his politics without ideology in favor of survival and reproduction, he chides: "We're going way of the future, and neither philosophically nor discouraging emotionally deficient will impede our progress. (...) So start thinking that you feel well enough for long enough, stop whining and go back to training. "

All nonsense, says Ligotti: "What are we going nowhere is not a curable condition; we go anywhere at the maximum possible speed could perhaps be curable, but not likely. "

Among the balms to get by without falling into the abyss of clarity and perfect knowledge (where there is only a not perfect and therefore perfectly painful), the writer appreciates the religious doctrines of first class, unlike cosmic truths discouraging never be never be grass defamation "because ordinary people perceived as edifying".
Ligotti is certain that mankind is and always will be unable to take charge of their own liberation. Remember that "human suffering will not be solved while there are human beings" and warns that, if not checked, "this process will take all the time to continue beating a single cell in this black pit of the solar system, this sewer Galaxy ".

The exit of suicide is not as simple as, for "any denial is adulterated or formulated to sneak in a positive spirit. You can not utter a "no" unequivocal and act accordingly with him. " Voluntary termination of life would be too easy, too useless and too unpleasant when you consider that scientists have a lifetime "####ing ourselves with their efforts to lengthen our days of pain and have done almost nothing on the other front."

The writer does not advocate killing, as well impels him a majority that the appeal of pessimism without obligation resists; is limited to conclude in its observation, experience and study, the amount of suffering in this world is enough to make anyone was better if he had not been born. And only sensible and proposes a fast-track to deliver our species paradoxical imperative of being: self-programmed disappearance.

Then proceed to discard the same Buddha to Jesus Christ, whom defined as "savior punch on a stick", highlights the theories transhumanists who aspire to our poshumanos and point mutation in the extremely rare that "diamond understanding" that is enlightenment by radical transformative spirituality, an ideal elevation that would allow us to stop participating in trade selves, losing the personality and manipulated like egomuertos, condition would still experiencing pain but no longer would take it personally .

Nothing is the same as the Antinatalism

"With the restrictions of conventional reality and personal capacity, we can choose to do whatever we want in this world ... with one exception: we can not choose what will be none of our choices. To do that we should be able to become self-made individuals who can choose what they choose, rather than individuals who simply choose. "
If we are definitely correct the error that embody evolutionary must stop reproducing. Suffice to procreate. The Gnostic sect of the Cathars, convinced that the world was an evil place without remission, I proposed in France in the twelfth century: abstinence or sodomy.Finally a useful self-help book!
The last to close

Ligotti sports because of illusion also lives. And keep writing. Know that we are the worst and that the bearing is not going to end, but appreciates the "false refuges" in which a vast minority of readers find romantic taste and comfort. Literary and philosophical works pessimistic, nihilistic or defeatist nature, "rubble of words in a book where someone whispers hoarsely: I also am here".

In the voice of Professor No, mysterious figure in the conspiracy against mankind intervenes to offer greater aesthetic passages flight, "the true fans macabre are as rare as the poets and form a secret society by the fact included blacklisted from other clubs, which in some cases canceled their membership since its birth. "

As good reader of genre literature Ligotti also knows that the fakes abound even among those dedicated to horror artists, and no doubt alert against those books and movies that betray their initial promise, countless works that begin as speeches from the darkness "but concludes with the author sneaking out the back door and advancing along a light path, leaving readers killed more hurt than they were before entering what turned out to be just a façade of ruins, a trompe l'oeil of desolation. "

Not the case of the conspiracy against mankind. Bedside book, by the way, the Rust Cohle of True Detective, this is one of those unusual examples of literature under his own thesis. A party. Precise thermostat nightmare exist in whose pages the amateur reader may ecstasy relieved desolation. Not to mourn.

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That's it. The philosophy is painful to read, but I've read worse in original English.

Your fall should be like the fall of mountains. But I was before mountains. I was in the beginning, and shall be forever. The first and the last. The world come full circle. I am not the wheel. I am the hand that turns the wheel. I am Time, the Destroyer. I was the wind and the stars before this. Before planets. Before heaven and hell. And when all is done, I will be wind again, to blow this world as dust back into endless space. To me the coming and going of Man is as nothing.